I have a Windows console application that uses a parallel IO card for high speed data transmission. (General Standards HPDI32ALT)
My process is running in user mode, however, I am sure somewhere behind the device's API there is some kernel mode driver activity (PCI DMA transfers, reading device status registers etc..) The working model is roughly this:
- at startup: I request a pointer to an IO buffer from API.
- in my main loop:
- block on API waiting for room in device's buffer (low watermark)
- fill the IO buffer with transmission data
- begin transmission to device by passing it the pointer to the IO buffer (during this time the API uses DMA on PCI bus to move the data to the card)
- block on API waiting for IO to complete
The application appears to be working correctly with proper data rate and sustained throughput for long periods of time, however, when I look at the process in sys internals tool process explorer I see a large number of page faults (~6k per second). I am moving ~30MB/s to the card.
I have plenty of RAM and am reasonably sure the page faults are not disk IO related.
Any thoughts on what could be causing the page faults? I also have a receive side to this application that is using an identical IO card in receive mode. The receive mode use of the API does not cause a large number page faults.
Could the act of moving the IO buffer to kernel mode cause page faults?